I was recently invited to blog about a panel discussion at the Science Writing in the Age of Denial conference here in Madison. The session “Persuasive writing in a world of denial” was designed to help writers communicate effectively with readers who question scientific consensus. Panelists spoke about the need to understand their audience’s existing mental models, and to write stories that take those models into account.
Posts by Gabe
Peter McCluskey is clearly proud of his handiwork. Standing on a forested slope in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, he describes the complex network of wet-dry lines, laterals, valves, and vacuum pumps that helps him and his family pull thousands of gallons of sap out of their maple trees every spring.
Translucent blue plastic tubes weave between and around the smooth-barked trees. Valves and fittings send smaller lines perpendicularly from the main line to individual trees, where they culminate in taps. “It looks like a big spider web,” McCluskey says.
Five generations of McCluskeys have farmed dairy cows in the hills and valleys of western Wisconsin, but they only decided to go commercial with maple syrup in 2009. With the help of a reverse osmosis filter the size of an industrial refrigerator and an even larger apparatus known as a steam-away machine, the McCluskeys can process thousands of gallons of sugar maple sap in a few hours. Last year they boiled over 40,000 gallons of sap down to 500 gallons of syrup and sold most of it at area farmers markets and to local restaurants.
This year, though, production was down by half. A sudden spell of sustained warm weather in March drastically shortened the window during which the state’s maples produced high-quality sap. The unseasonable temperatures caused multiple problems, Peter explains.
“Ideally what we’d like to do is get mid 40s and sunny during the day, and 20s at night. That sends the sap up the tree during the day and back down and night, and prolongs the trees from flowering. This year it sits at 70 for two weeks, the trees aren’t going to stay dormant, they’re going to say ‘oh it’s time to grow,’ and we have a short season.”
In addition, Peter’s uncle Brian explains, the warm weather happened so fast that some of the sap actually fermented in its holding tank before they were able to process it.
Eric Kruger, a tree physiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains why maples need alternating above-freezing days and below-freezing nights for sustained sap production. “When the water in the stem freezes at night, that creates a physical suction that will draw water from soil through the roots into that region of frozen water. Frozen water attracts water. So in order for the trees to stay pressurized, there has to be water drawn up to replace the water that’s been tapped.
“It happens solely when it’s freezing.”
While the McCluskeys have taken a hit this year, others in the state have fared worse. Gretchen Grape, the executive director of the Wisconsin Maple Syrup Producers Association, told a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter that it was the worst year she and her husband could remember for maple syrup. Other Wisconsin producers only made enough syrup for personal consumption.
Unfortunately for these producers, warm winters and early springs may soon be the new normal. Winter is the season that is predicted to warm the most due to climate change in Wisconsin, according to the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts, a partnership between University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The organization’s 2011 report forecasts average winter temperature increases of 7.5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit between 1980 and 2055. Beyond simple warming, increased weather volatility will also make things less predictable for producers on a year-to-year basis.
Wisconsin’s maple sugar producers contribute only a tiny fraction of the state’s $60 billion a year agriculture industry, and few of them rely solely on syrup for their income. But they do represent an economy and a tradition that goes back farther than almost any other agriculture practice in the state, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society. Native Americans tapped maple trees before Europeans arrived in Wisconsin, and immigrants from New England and New York brought the practice with them. Enough warming, however, and this tradition could be lost.
For the McCluskeys, though, the forecasts of warming aren’t an immediate concern. They have some syrup left over from last year that they hope will plug this year’s gap.
In fact, they don’t even plan to raise their price. “We have a pretty good customer base and we don’t want to change that,” says Peter.
And in the end, they acknowledge they have limited control over what the trees give them.
Standing in his family’s maple forest, Peter reminds me, “Mother Nature’s in charge, not you.”
I’ve been thinking about a growing dichotomy in our experiences–those that are “real,” and those that are mediated by the internet (in other words, “not real”). The internet started as a mere enhancement to the world we all knew was the world that mattered. But now the real world has begun reflecting the internet meta-world. I sometimes play a game with myself in which I look around wherever I happen to be and try to find evidence that the internet exists. It’s rare that I don’t see a something.com or, worse, one of those square bar codes printed on some product or package or newsletter or advertisement. The internet has colonized our kitchens, our bathrooms, even our outdoor spaces.
As a writer and a student, I now spend perhaps half my waking life in the “real world” and half in front of a computer screen. This seems odd to me, since the ostensible purpose of studying is to learn about the actual world, not the cybernetic projection of that world, and likewise it is the real world that I wish to write about. I insist that my computer is merely a tool, like a hammer or a salad spinner. A very useful tool, but still a tool (n) — “A device…used to perform or facilitate manual or mechanical work.” [1] Because what is a computer but a tool for manipulating electric charges and magnetic moments?
But it’s not convincing. The hammer and the salad spinner don’t present me with an alternate world; they just allow me to manipulate specific aspects of the real world (nails, lettuce). They don’t exert a pull–I never feel compelled to get out my hammer and check the latest anything. I don’t feel guilty when I spend hours or even days without using my salad spinner.
I’ve been trying to learn to identify trees. My whole life I’ve loved going to the woods to hike, to get sweaty, to attain a good view, to listen to bird songs, to eat a good trail meal, and sometimes to camp. All this would be meaningless without trees–they provide the backdrop, the texture, the structure to the whole experience–not to mention the basis for the entire ecosystem known as “the woods.” But until recently, I’d barely paid any attention to what kinds of trees the woods are made of.
Now, I’ve always done well in school, and I’ve had my intellectual aptitude affirmed by various dreary tests over the years. But I feel like a complete idiot at identifying trees. I can tell an oak and a maple, when they have their leaves. If it has smooth white bark it’s most likely a birch; if it holds onto its leaves through the winter but is not an oak, it’s probably a beech. Identifying redwoods is a cinch, but of little use if you’re not on the west coast. I know a pine, unless it’s a fir. Beyond that, I’ve been pretty useless at trees most of my life.
I could ask several questions. One is why I’ve been able to advance so far in my education without mastering something as basic as the composition of the natural communities around me. But I’m more interested in why my mind, which can discern pretty subtle variations in algebraic equations or Shakespearean sonnets, strains at arguably less subtle distinctions between species and families of trees. I find myself wanting an app that will just tell me the type of tree I’m looking at. But that would short-circuit any actual change in my brain–i.e. learning (and besides, I don’t want to get a smart phone). So I struggle with an old field guide and try to match a flat image of a leaf on a page with a real fluttering leaf in front of me.
The other day I went to the Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Monona, Wisconsin for the grand opening of its new climate change exhibit. Walking into the exhibit I passed an impressive bank of perhaps 20 or 25 computers (I can only assume they’re cooled by a hyper-efficient solar-powered fan system). The exhibit itself buzzed with human and cybernetic activity. In any place I stood I could hear eight different computerized voices and see 20 glowing displays. There were things to touch, spin, slide, push, pull. The sensory stimulation was almost overwhelming.
One interactive panel showed how much different parts of the world have warmed over the past century, with blobs of orange and red displacing earlier blobs of blue; another did something similar for the century to come. Yet another showed the areas of eastern Maryland that will be flooded by different amounts of sea level rise, and for some reason the exhibit makers had decided to feature prominently the retreat of a particular glacier in Washington state. Numerous displays played videos, though any sound was immediately lost to the surrounding din.
The piece de resistance was Science on a Sphere — a six-foot diameter animated globe suspended in the center a dark round room, with a circular bench running around the perimeter. I found the narration of the show to be somewhat jumbled and jargony, but the visuals were stunning, and I mean just utterly stunning. It was the beauty of nature pixellated and enhanced a thousand times. It was color so intense it saturated your eye, and your brain. It was impossible to look away.
I wondered, though, what happens when we provide ourselves and our children with such hyperintense images of nature on TV and the computer, and impoverished natural communities in the real world? Are we losing our ability to discern the subtle variations of actual natural environments? Do we risk finding meta-nature more real than nature itself?
The answer may be no.
I escaped the exhibit and joined a nature walk around the center’s modest but pleasant grounds. The naturalist asked us to identify a stand of trees, and I accurately recognized basswood. (yes!) We smelled and tasted the evil garlic mustard. Later, while we were standing around a bird box, one of the children picked up a small nest that had fallen out of it. Another noticed that an egg, perhaps the size of an almond, had rolled onto the ground. A third picked up the egg and remarked that it was still warm. None of us adults noticed these things, but we were moved to see the children doing so.
A bit later we came to a pond, where the naturalist debated a boy about whether a floating object was a turtle or a log. Some of kids put their hands in the pond and remarked that it was cold. Walking on, a girl found a snail shell no larger than my thumbnail in the mud. The naturalist encouraged us to hum into the shell, to encourage the snail to come out. Finally we came to a table where pond water had been scooped into various containers. Children fished out various beetles, skaters, and tadpoles from the weedy muck. It was a delightful, messy free-for-all.
I looked across the pond and saw a stand of small and intensely green conifers. A tamarack swamp! For an article I’m writing, I’ve been looking for trees in southern Wisconsin that will be chased out by climate change, and the tamarack is the most dramatic example I’ve found. I’m from the south and have rarely seen a tamarack, but I’ve come to feel some affection for this noble tree since moving here. I’d read–on the internet, of course–that these swamps are likely to dry up and be invaded by other species over the next century.
Leaving the group, I walked over to the tamaracks and felt their downy needles–the only coniferous leaves that are shed come fall. The muddy ground oozed slightly beneath my feet, and some assertive birds sang in the canopy. This was obviously a young stand, no more than the size of a modest urban backyard, and hardly likely to save the tamarack in southern Wisconsin. But still it thrilled me, the bright-eyed tree student.
I have just labored over a computer keyboard and a glowing screen to distill some real and internet-mediated experiences into a small succession of words for anonymous, and perhaps imaginary, readers. These words have been encoded as a set of electric impulses, sent over some wires, and stored as magnetic spins on some computer server in a warehouse somewhere (perhaps New Jersey).
You, dear reader, have directed your computer tool to decode these spins back into words, and you have now spent a few minutes of your life reading my humble post. If nothing else, I hope it has made you want to turn off your computer, get out of your chair, go outside, look at things that are growing, listen to animal songs, smell the scents of pollen and decay, feel the wind and sun on your skin, forage a wild edible…
Go ahead and go. Seriously. Now. STOP READING THIS.
[1] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Accessed April 22, 2012 at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/tool
Dares and Death
One of the many strange things humans do is dare each other to eat unpleasant things. You can find videos on YouTube of people downing something stinging (e.g. mustard, wasabi), acidic (lemon or lime juice), or spicy (chili powder), all for a small sum of money, or maybe just peer admiration. Sometimes the dare involves a quantity rather than a quality of food (a whole cake, six hot dogs). Of course, the most entertaining involve eating animals–cicadas, cockroaches, worms. The eaters are most often younger males of the Homo sapiens species, and they usually seem to fare OK once the moment of ingestion is over, and digestion has begun.
But sometimes these experiments don’t turn out so well. In 2010, a man in Sydney, Australia nearly died after contracting a rare lungworm from a slug he ate on a dare. And in 1979, an Oregon man did die from eating, while drunk, Taricha granulosa, the rough-skinned newt, which carries in its skin one of the most exquisitely toxic substances known. Tetrodotoxin is a potent neurotoxin that binds to and blocks the sodium ion channels that regulate our heartbeat. Essentially, it prevents the heart from beating.
Evolution certainly is a strange force, to produce both toxic newts and male humans who occasionally choose to eat them.
Newts and Bacteria
It’s pretty clear why the Taricha newts would have evolved to carry this poisonous defense. Newts are small and soft-bodied, and could make an easy meal for a snake or other predator. But the newt only benefits from carrying this toxin if predators know to avoid it before chomping down. And for that purpose, Taricha granulosa has evolved a bright orange belly (orange and red are nature’s standard toxicity warning signs), as well as a back-arching behavior known as “unkenning,” which exposes the bright underside to predators. For some nice close-ups of Taricha granulosa, check out the Backyard Zoologist’s blog post on these critters.
But wait! There’s more to this story. It seems that newts may not produce tetrodotoxin themselves–they may outsource this job to a set of bacteria. Tetrodotoxin is found in widely varying parts of the animal kingdom–sea stars, flatworms, blue-ringer octopi, and pufferfish, among others. It can serve as a predatory toxin as well as a defensive one. It seems likely (to me, at least) that it would have evolved once in bacteria and perhaps been shared through horizontal gene transfer, rather than evolve many times in animals.
The question then becomes, what benefit do the bacteria receive for protecting their diverse hosts? Presumably they get a home and some nourishment, but I’m not sure the precise answer is known. Even the bacterial synthesis of newt tetrodotoxin seems to be uncertain, for now. But if true, it is a beautiful example of symbiosis–of tightly co-evolved species helping each other survive in an uncertain world.
Man and Risk
Meanwhile, the same species that has been puzzling out the secrets of newt toxicity has also evolved a propensity to engage in risky–and sometimes stupid–behavior, like newt ingestion. And it does seem that males of this species engage in this kind of behavior more readily than females. In a paper that came out in 2008, two evolutionary psychologists found that males were more likely to cut it close when trying to catch a bus, and to take risks when crossing a street–especially if women were watching.
What benefits might accrue from all this risk taking–besides the hope of getting a date? Nowadays, it seems, risk taking is best known for getting us in trouble–refer to the economic collapse of 2008 (caused mostly by men) for more details. But risk taking throughout history has also has its rewards–often spectacular ones. Elizabeth Kolbert, in her profile of Svante Pääbo in the New Yorker last August, explores the idea that it may have been risk taking may have set humans apart from Neanderthals. Neanderthals, it seems, spread until they reached “water or some other significant obstacle.” Humans kept going.
Snakes and Newts
Did the newt get a free pass in the game of chomp, once it teamed up with toxin-producing bacteria? Hardly. There is an animal that can eat the Taricha newt and live to tell the tale–the garter snake Thamnophis sirtalis. Somewhere in evolutionary history, a chance mutation produced a tetrodotoxin-resistant sodium channel, which, as Ed Yong nicely put it, “open[ed] up an exclusive menu of newts unavailable to other predators.” There is a cost though–snakes can be immobilized for up to seven hours while digesting a newt, making them possible prey for another animal.
But again, there’s more. Scientists recently learned that some populations of the garter snake have evolved to become more resistant to tetrodotoxin than others, and don’t need to undergo such a long period of immobility. In fact, these snakes are now so resistant that the researchers believe the newts will not be able to evolve a higher toxicity level to match. But this too comes at a cost–the highly resistant move slower in general, perhaps giving the newts the opportunity to run away more easily.
The scientists publishing these results describe the newt toxin/snake resistance co-evolution as an “arms race,” and posit that the snakes have temporarily escaped from the race. But what if we instead consider the metaphor of a chess game, where each species makes its evolutionary move (newt: form symbiosis with toxic bacteria; snake: develop resistant sodium channels), and waits for its opponent to counter? I like this metaphor, because it suggests a very close co-evolutionary bond, like two competitors sitting across a table. The question then becomes, have the snakes checkmated the newts, or do the newts have another move in store?
Chess and Life
Chess players (who tend to be mostly men) must take risks if they want to win, and sometimes these risks go badly: a sacrificed piece doesn’t pay off; an exposed king comes under attack. But the consequences are limited–a lost game, maybe some lost money or pride. In life, the stakes are higher, and the set of options much larger and harder to evaluate. How many snakes chomped a newt and died before one managed to survive the meal and, belly full, reproduce and pass on its resistant genes? Or, as Kolbert quotes Pääbo, “‘How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island?’”
The garter snake that survived the newt toxin clearly benefited from its risk-taking. We humans have also benefited enormously from ours. We have colonized almost every habitat on earth, our average life spans have more than doubled, and our material living standards have increased immensely. And yet, we are taking larger risks than ever before with the very resources and ecosystems that sustain us. Natural communities depend on ancient co-evolutionary associations that are often finely matched to each other, and we are changing these balances, often drastically–akin to removing pieces from the chessboard, if you will. How long can we continue tampering with the game before we make our planet toxic to all life, including ourselves? Only time will tell.
We humans long outlive most of the species we interact with. Our cats and dogs accompany us for about fifteen years at most; livestock rarely make it more then a few; our garden annuals live, by definition, only one season. Many of the insects that bug us in summer will be gone within weeks, having done their evolutionary duty and spawned the next generation. Our environment is a bustling funeral parlor, and we the unknowing bystanders to a hectic daily schedule of corpse deliveries, wakes, burials, and rebirths.
Bur oaks in the Pleasant Valley Conservancy, one of the few remaining patches of oak savanna in southeastern Wisconsin. Photo by Beate Popkin
But then there are the trees. Trees have figured out the longevity game. The longest-lived individuals on earth are trees over four thousand years old; if you count clonal tree colonies like aspens, you can go back at least 80,000 years. Even our familiar oaks can easily outlive us by a factor of five or more, under good conditions. Trees have achieved this Methuselan longevity by trading mobility for rootedness, making the implicit (and until humans came around, mostly reasonable) assumption that conditions aren’t likely to change drastically within a lifetime. By staying in one place, trees can grow roots that extend far below ground, allowing them access to deep stores of water and nutrients that nurture them through centuries of floods, droughts, and whatever else nature throws at them.
Unfortunately, conditions are changing, and fast. Scientists predict that the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we are putting in the atmosphere will lead to an increase in average annual temperature in Wisconsin of around 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2055, relative to 1980. Depending on how voracious our appetite for fossil fuels continues to be, and whether global warming triggers various positive feedbacks leading to more greenhouse gas emissions, we could see future warming on the same scale. Plants that have been used to relatively stable conditions for millennia will suddenly need to “move” north, not by packing up and walking, but by throwing their seeds as far as they can and hoping they produce offspring. The scientific term for this is dispersal, and for trees it is typically limited to a few miles, or less.
Ecologists talk about “climate envelopes” in which different species can live. For trees, these can be vast areas, or relatively limited niches. As the planet warms, tree climate envelopes in the Northern hemisphere will shrink and shift north, in many cases by hundreds of miles, according to a 2007 paper in the journal Bioscience. Tree seed dispersal, on the other hand, seems to be limited to around 30 miles per century–not likely to be a winning pace in the race against warming.
The good news is that climate change alone will not doom most (or perhaps any) of Wisconsin’s trees to total extinction. However, species like black spruce, balsam fir, and paper birch may be packing up and leaving the state for good in the near future, according to the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impact’s 2011 report. The northern forests of Wisconsin are already at the southern edge of these trees’ ranges, and sometime later this century they will no longer find this state a hospitable home. In southern Wisconsin, tamarack swamps–an ecosystem already beset by multiple plights–may fall victim to warming as well. Other species will be more than happy to take the places of the departed, but the biodiversity represented by native ecosystems will never be replaced.
Remains of a prairie fire. Photo by Beate Popkin
The aforementioned oaks are having problems of their own. Southern Wisconsin, especially around Madison, used to be a mix of prairie and oak savanna. Prairies need periodic fires to suppress tree growth; otherwise they soon become forests. But bur oaks, with their “thick crust of corky bark” (in Aldo Leopold’s words), are one of the few trees that can withstand these fires. Fire and oak together created a unique ecosystem that is now one of the most endangered in the United States, according to The Vanishing Present, a book co-edited by University of Wisconsin botanist Don Waller.
The European settlers who arrived in the middle of the 1800s, naturally not wanting their crops to burn down, suppressed the fires that had kept the prairie open for ages. And suddenly successional, fire-intolerant species started growing in places where they never could have gained a foothold before. But things change slowly in the world of trees, and it takes a trained eye to notice. We still have oak forests, but they are old now–oak seedlings are few, and grow mainly on poor soil. Good historical data can also help those with trained eyes describe the world around us today. Waller and co-authors described in a 2008 article in the journal Ecology a survey they conducted of sites that had also been surveyed in 1950. The scientists found that oaks have declined across Wisconsin, while maples, elms, basswoods, and others have increased. More significantly, perhaps, they measured a loss of biodiversity across all their sites–a harbinger, it seems, of things to come.
In the end, we will pass on from this life, and trees of some kind will bear witness. But what kind of trees they are matters. Trees have been the anchors of ecosystems since ancient times, and when they are gone, the lichens, understory plants, insects, and other animals they sheltered will not just be able to make their home in whatever kind of forest comes next. Many of them will have to move elsewhere, or perish. It seems we are looking at a simplified biological future with a relatively small number of winners, and a lot of losers.
1. Begin procrastination. Tell yourself you need to get your other work done so that you can clear your mind so that you can be creative, and besides, it’s not really procrastination if you’re doing other work. Moreover, James Surowiecki admitted he procrastinates on his writing assignments, and he writes for the New Yorker, so surely you can, too. By the way, did you know that the root of the word “procrastinate” is from the Latin word for tomorrow? I didn’t either, until just now. I think it’s brilliant.
2. Realize that you will never get your other work done. Open computer. Check email. Check New York Times website. Read story about ancient horse that shrank during a period of warming 56 million years ago. Note that one of the scientists quoted in the story is named Koch, and start thinking about the Koch brothers (presumably unrelated), one of whom funded the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins in the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. Remember how annoyed you were that this exhibit spun past climate change as an important driver of human evolution. Wonder how David H. Koch would spin the shrinking horse. Remember Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article in which she quotes the museum’s director saying Koch was “completely hands off.” Scoff.
3. Close browser; open word processing program. Stare at blank white rectangle. Wonder about the neurological basis for writer’s block. Discover that this, too, has been discussed in the New Yorker. Evidently at least one neuroscientist believes we may soon be able to cure writer’s block by magnetically stimulating parts of our brain. Rejoice.
4. Read other list stories for inspiration. Then remember beautiful list story from Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, in which he uses the rings of an oak tree he saws through to tell the history of his land in reverse chronological order. Find book; find story; reread story. Wish you were enough of a woodsman and Wisconsin natural historian to update Leopold’s list for 2012. Make note to self to return to this topic in 20 years, and to go to the Sand County Almanac reading at the UW-Madison arboretum this weekend if you can.
5. Wonder if Aldo Leopold ever wrote for the New Yorker. Conduct search, find nothing.
6. Return to blank white rectangle. Start thinking of ideas. History of discovery of climate change—too depressing. Steps to becoming a tomato plant—too esoteric. Ways you can tell if you got toxoplasmosis from your cat—too weird. (Apparently a third of the world may be infected with toxo, according to a recent Atlantic article. So are you really procrastinating, or is it the toxo making you do it?)
7. Have brilliant idea: the numbers in your list can be the world’s human population, progressing along a logarithmic scale (1, 10, 100, 1000, etc), and the elements can describe conditions on earth at the time. Realize you have no idea what was happening when world’s population was any of those numbers. Besides, remind self that somewhere along the way we became part Neanderthal, as discussed by Elizabeth Kolbert in a recent (you guessed it) New Yorker article.
8. Realize you’ve written a list story. Wonder why ideas worth writing only surface at midnight or later. Go to bed.
Moving to Wisconsin, as I did this past year, I expected winter to be white, windy, bleak. I expected it to be a blanket, to press down on us, to whip us around, to send us scurrying through the streets and into shops and cafes. I was actually looking forward to weather so oppressive that I would want to stay indoors, alone—weather that would quiet the din of the world so I could think. Quiet. That is what winter should be. A time when activity slacks, slows, stops. A time when we meet occasionally, if loudly, for bursts of cheer, to break the solitude. But mostly it should be solitude. A time when the distances between us stretch.
But this winter is timid. What little snow has fallen has mostly meted, leaving bare brown grass to make its shivering stand against the wind. We go outside in light jackets, scratch our heads—yes, it feels nice not to have the wind etching lines into our faces, but isn’t something missing? Solitude is missing; there is nothing to slow us down this winter, so we don’t slow ourselves, we barrel ahead furiously, but toward what?
I want to stay with slowness for a while. It is out of fashion, has been for some time. I need not dwell on the infinite ways technology has quickened us (but I will). Once, not even so long ago, the Americas and China knew not even of each other’s existence. Thousands of years passed in each place, entirely separate. Now, news in China is news in America in less than a second. We know more about planets in other solar systems than a Mayan a thousand years ago knew about Africa. The pace of life these ancient people must have led would be unbearable to us now. What could they have done all day? And yet, this is who we are. We are slow beings forced to be fast. Someone once said to me that when we fill our lives to the brim, when we force ourselves to be always busy, always running to the next thing, we do violence to ourselves. I thought, if we do violence, does that mean we are injuring ourselves? And if so, how would we know?
Rob Nixon speaks of another kind of violence. We as a species are committing slow but vicious violence upon ourselves through climate change. Heat means quickness, activity, motion. As the Earth and its atmosphere gain energy, things will speed up, and collide more frequently, with more force. Storms will rage, insects will swarm, diseases will spread, and masses of coastal people will be on the move, looking for new homes. Where will they go? Will we let them in? We, who have through our carelessness, and our mad pursuit of speed, perpetrated this slow violence against them, flooding their homes?
For us in the middle of continents, the sea will remain distant. But winter will retreat toward the far north. Good riddance, some might say. But wait—isn’t winter part of who we are? There are pictures of me as a baby red-faced and bundled against the cold. If parents don’t have to bundle their children against the cold, what does that mean for parents, and children? Snowmen, snowball fights, sledding, hot chocolate, puzzles by the fireplace when the snow was too deep or the night too cold to go outside. Sweaters, coats, jackets, scarves, wool hats and socks, boots and mittens. What if my own children don’t know these things—will they have lost a part of themselves (will that part have been cut out of them)? If we are a sum of our experiences, and we no longer experience winter, are we less?
Here in Wisconsin, winter defines—or has defined—a third of the year. The men who sit stoically on buckets over small holes in the ice for hours (what are they made of that I am not?)—what will happen to them? The skier gliding through the quiet woods, the pirouetting skater on the frozen pond, the hunter stalking his prey—where will they go? What if one third of people’s lives are taken away, what do we call that?
Winter used to be the time when we were not what we were the rest of the time. We were not farmers, bicyclers, porch-sitters—we became skiers, readers, thinkers. Annie Dillard writes: “I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia…At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.” In winter we retreated. Retreat—to withdraw, to take shelter. Winter was a time of retreat, but is now itself in retreat. It won’t happen all at once—maybe next year winter will be cold and full of snow, and we’ll say, “ah yes, this is what we remember.” But thirty, forty years from now, when children I may someday have might be the age I am now, winter won’t be what we know it as. We will be left out in the cold, except we won’t be, because there will be no cold. The world will swirl ever faster; we will look for a quiet place to retreat to and there will be none. How ironic that in our mad pursuit of speed, we have accidentally made speed the only choice—our destiny.
I have been thinking lately how we are all going to spend the rest of our lives on a planet that is different–possible very different–from the one we’ve lived on until now. There really is no going back. Humans have transformed 40-50% of the Earth’s land, according to a paper I recently read. We increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by around 2 parts per million each year, and this is going to have major effects on the earth’s climate for the foreseeable future. We are in the middle of the Holocene extinction–human-caused species extinction rates are perhaps 100 times the background rate, and may rise to 100 times that, according to another paper. In my lifetime we may see the end of the tropical rainforests.
These are the global facts. The local facts seem less dire. Here in Wisconsin, we’re having a warm winter–it’s late January, and the temperature tonight won’t dip below freezing. There’s barely enough snow to ski on around Madison. Local residents tell how the lakes used to freeze earlier and thaw later, and how their kids can no longer skate on ponds that used to ice over reliably. An irruption has brought us snowy owls from Canada–actually a welcome development for many, though I can’t claim to have seen one myself. (By the way, I love the word “irruption” and its evocation of volcanoes–I can just imagine thousands of owl erupting from their northern habitats and flying to all kinds of southerly places, including, apparently, Hawaii.) We can see the changes happening around us, but the time scales are long compared to most of the worries, thrills, and soporifics we face every day. We lament the weather, perhaps we worry for a moment, and then we go on with our lives.
I’m starting this blog so I won’t always just go on with my life. I want to explore how this place I live is changing, and how that will affect human communities, living beings, and the natural places we love. In these rapids we are paddling, I will look for some fixed points. I will prevent myself from descending into despair. I plan to keep my focus mostly local, but these are global issues, and I may wander farther afield. I hope you’ll wander with me.
